“Your name’s Cohen,” he declared. “Next!”
When Josh Crawford walked off the little stage in the small auditorium on Hester Street with his diploma in his hand, he felt thoroughly comfortable with his new name. Some of his classmates tried to make him a little less comfortable — it was all well and good to change Isaac to Irving, but the boy who changed Cohen to Crawford was taking a pretty big step. Josh ignored them, and in the fall he registered at Stuyvesant High School as Joshua Crawford and nobody saw anything wrong in the new name.
Even before the graduation ceremonies at PS 105, Joshua Crawford’s life was mapped out and set on its course. He would go to Stuyvesant and graduate at or near the top of his class. From there he would move on to City College where Ivy League educations were dispensed at no cost to the recipient.
Meanwhile he would work — afternoons after school, evenings, and Saturdays. His mother would not approve of his working on the Sabbath but this could not be helped, for law school was not tuition-free and he had already decided that he would go to law school immediately upon graduation from CCNY. In order to do this he would have to have money saved up, and in order to save up money he would have to work, and if Sabbath observance had to suffer that was just one of those things. Even at the age of nineteen, Josh Crawford had come to the profound realization that the only way to hold your head up and enjoy life in America was to have as much money as possible. America was filled to overflowing with money and he was out to get his.
He got it. It was not easy and it was not accomplished without work and sacrifice, but Josh was a born worker and a willing sacrificer. He was by no means the smartest boy at Stuyvesant but he finished far ahead of most of the brighter boys. Many of them were dreamers while he was a planner and this made a big difference. He studied what had to be studied and worked over what had to be worked over and his marks were always very high.
He worked afternoons pushing a garment truck on Seventh Avenue for a dress manufacturer who had lived on Essex Street just a block or two away from where Josh was born. The work was hard and the pay was small, but while he did not earn much money he spent hardly any at all. He worked Saturdays wrapping parcels at Gimbel’s, and he saved that money, too.
When he went to City as a pre-law major his studies were correspondingly harder and he had to give up the afternoon job. But it didn’t matter — by the time he had completed three years at City, he had enough money and enough academic credits to enter law school at New York University.
Law school, clerkship, bar exams, flunkey work. Junior partner, member of the firm.
Hester Street, 14th Street, Central Park West, New Rochelle, Dobbs Ferry.
$15-a-week, $145-a-week, $350-a-month, $9550-a-year, $35,000-a-year.
His life was a series of triumphs, triumphs represented by titles and addresses and numbers. The setbacks, such as they were, were negative rather than positive disappointments. He never failed at anything he set out to do, not in the long run, and his few setbacks were in point of time. If it took him a year longer to become a junior partner, an extra few years to become a member of the firm, if his salary (or, when he was a member of Taylor, Lazarus and Crawford, his average annual income) moved along more slowly than he wished, this was unfortunate but something swiftly corrected.
The apartment on 14th Street was more private and more comfortable than the flat he had shared with his parents on the Lower East Side. The apartment on Central Park West was still more comfortable, as were in turn the house in New Rochelle and the larger and more desirable house in Dobbs Ferry.
Somewhere along the line he got married. Marriage never figured prominently in his plans. After a time it became professionally desirable, and when that happened a marriage broker in the old neighborhood went to work and came up with a wife for him.
The girl, Selma Kaplan, was neither homely nor attractive. Her reasons for marrying Josh paralleled his reasons for marrying her. She was at the perilous age where an unmarried girl was well on her way to becoming an old maid, an altogether unappealing prospect. Joshua Crawford was a young man with all the earmarks of success, a definite “good catch,” and as his wife she would have security, respect, and a small place in the sun.
They were married between 14th Street and Central Park West, and a month or so before the junior partnership Selma Crawford was deflowered at a good midtown hotel and broken to saddle during a two-week honeymoon at a run-down resort in the Poconos. She was neither the best nor the worst woman Josh had slept with, just as she was neither the first nor the last, and her general lack of enthusiasm for sexual relations was cancelled out by her lack of distaste for the sex act.
She was a good cook, a good housekeeper, an adequate mother for Lewis and Sybil Crawford. The family’s living quarters were never untidy, the cupboard was never bare, and the children grew up without displaying any of the more obvious neuroses that Selma read about periodically in the books that were periodically being read on Central Park West.
Her life was her home, her children, and her female friends who lived lives much the same as her own. Her husband’s life was his work, his own advancement in the world, his business acquaintances. If you had asked Selma Crawford whether or not she loved her husband, she would have answered at once that she did; in private she might have puzzled over your question, might have been a bit disturbed by it. If you asked the same question of Josh Crawford he would probably answer in much the same way. He, however, would not puzzle over the question — it would be answered automatically and forgotten just as automatically the minute he had answered it.
Love, all things considered, had nothing to do with it. Joshua and Selma Crawford lived together, brought up children together, worked separately and together to achieve the Great American Dream. They enjoyed what any onlooker would have described as the perfect marriage.
That is, until Josh Crawford did a very strange thing, a thing which he himself was hard put to explain to himself. He might have blamed it on his age — he was forty-six — or on the fact that his professional advancement had more or less leveled off to an even keel. But wherever you place the blame, the action itself stands.
Joshua Crawford fell in love with a young prostitute named Honour Mercy Bane.
“Accredited Paper Goods,” said a female voice.
“This is Joshua Crawford.”
A pause. A name was checked in a file of 3 x 5 index cards. Then: “Good afternoon, Mr. Crawford. What can we do for you?”
“I’d like a shipment early this evening, if possible.”
“Certainly, Mr. Crawford. We’ve got a fresh shipment of 50-weight stock that just arrived at the warehouse a week ago. Good material in a red-and-white wrapping.”
“Fine,” Crawford said.
“You’ll want delivery at the usual address?”
“That’s right.”
“We can have the order to you by nine o’clock,” the voice said. “Will that be all right?”
“Fine,” said Crawford.
Crawford rang off, then called Selma in Dobbs Ferry and told her he’d be working late at the office. The call completed, he leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. The phone call to “Accredited Paper Goods” wasn’t particularly subtle, he thought. Fifty-weight stock in a red-and-white wrapping meant a fifty-dollar call girl with red hair and white skin, and by no stretch of the imagination could it have anything in the world to do with paper.